Users of Anthropic’s Claude AI had a rough Monday morning. First of all, Claude’s status was mixed with rolling outages reported. Eventually, maintenance status messaging appeared as the app’s developers appeared to be working through the problem.
The good news for customers is that Claude returned, but a cohort of their customers continue to have issues – namely with the Writing Styles feature.
What is Claude.ai’s Writing Styles?
Writing Styles is arguably Claude’s most powerful feature for content creators. You simple take some of your own personal or brand’s content, written before you started integrating AI into your workflow, and give it to Claude. Claude will then review it and take notes on tone of voice, preferred words, rhythm and colloquialisms along with general language.
The notes are passed through Claud’s LLM and a Writing Style is created. It’s an extremely powerful feature that indeed allows AI to create more natural, and authentic, sounding pieces of content that look less like AI slop.
In 2024, I was building my own startup that focused on this very approach of providing AI prompts with more context around style and have always been incredibly impressed with Claude’s content since I discovered this feature.
Where are Claude’s Writing Styles Gone?
Unfortunately, as part of Monday’s outages, Writing Styles have vanished and still not returned. For a majority of customers, this is unlikely to be an issue as it might not even be a feature that’s used or missed. But for writers and content creators, losing a brand or personal Writing Style that’s been honed to accelerate a workflow is a massive pain.
Whether or not the Writing Styles will return remains to be seen. Some iOS users reported getting them back briefly, suggesting there is a backup in Claude’s systems. I’ve reached out to Anthropic for comment.
